Games that Time Forgot: Pole Position (C64)

Author: Vince | Date: June 14, 2008

In honour of this weekends 24 Heures du Mans this weeks Game that Time Forgot is the classic C64 racing game, Pole Position. Released by Atari in 1983 on the C64, 1982 in the arcades and almost every other format under the sun at the time, it was one of the first racing games released for home systems, and widely regarded as popularising the genre. It is a real old school arcade racing affair here, you race to complete laps before the timer runs down and the game ends, every completed lap extends your timer until you complete the required amount of laps to finish the race.

Running of the track and into the grass will slow your car, obviously, and hitting another car or a trackside board will cause you to explode and be reset to the middle of the track at 0mph. The cars only have 2 gears, LO and HI with a top speed of 244mph and the handling is not really sensitive, but then as a rule you don’t need to turn for corners as you are pretty much on rails. You will need to swerve past the other cars and debris on track, which is trickier than it sounds. The difficulty was pretty fiendish too, I remember struggling to complete any of the races before the timer ran down, as most of the lap times were over 1 minute and you were only rewarded with 60 seconds for completing each lap.

Unlike the arcade version, the home console versions had more than one race track to choose from, but none of them looked any different to play, just had a different sequence of corners. The graphics for the C64 version were just about the worst of all the ports, but still that did not matter at the time, as the game was so much fun… Sadly after some play today, that gameplay doesn’t really stick around, the nostalgia was fun for the first 5 minutes, but it soon dragged after that.

Perhaps Atari should take a look at these games in their retro vault and perhaps look at a remake in shiny HD an using modern technology, not a full retail game, as that would probably flop just like the new Outrun did, but as a PSN/XBLA/Steam game, it could be a winner.

Also, this game has one of the greatest TV ads ever! Check it out here…

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.